Clinton Montague

Developer, learner of things, functional programming enthusiast, hacker, and all round inquisitor.

Making sense of Bayes rule

February 17, 2019

Bayes rule has always seemed like witchcraft to me. But today I went through the derivation, and then thought through why it is useful. Suddenly it started making a bit more sense. Thinking about it in a machine learning setting, let’s say that we have a dataset containing cats and dogs, and their respective names. […]

Starting machine learning

February 16, 2019

For a few years now, I’ve been sitting here wishing that I knew machine learning. Yearning for a job where I was looking at data and writing algorithms to find patterns and make predictions. But the problem is exactly that. I’ve been sitting and wishing, not learning and doing. True, I did a course on Coursera a […]

Deriving the quadratic formula

November 1, 2014

x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}

Everyone can reel it off, it was banged into us at school. Where does the quadratic formula come from, and how can you get at it?

Generative art experiment 5

April 24, 2013

I’ve played with visualising the forces between particles that repel each other before, but I thought I’d have a little play around with how I could use that to create something that actually looked good (to me at least!) I put it together on codepen (which is my new favourite tool, by the way) so […]

The awesometer

March 31, 2013

I wondered the other day – where is the most awesome place on earth RIGHT NOW? That made me think two things: we overuse the word awesome it would be cool to use this as an excuse to use the Twitter streaming API So I fired up npm, installed ntwitter and within minutes had simple program […]

Generative art experiment 4: colourful roots

February 26, 2013

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about anything interesting that I’ve made in Processing. Time to put an end to that! Allow me to present “colourful roots”. It started off as a simple particle system with the usual fade effect, but when I let the particle shrink and stay fully opaque, I was delighted […]

Photographing the Moon

January 31, 2012

I’ve recently become obsessed with the night sky. I think that it was Jupiter turning up in October last year which did it. Since then I’ve looked up for Jupiter on a nightly basis, and have become interested in what else is up there too. While I don’t know what most of the constellations are, […]

Generative art experiment 3.5: Lord of the targets

January 30, 2012

void setup () { smooth(); size(500,900); render (); } void render () { fill (0, 0); background(255, 100, 0); for (int i = 0; i < random(50, 200); i++) { drawRings (); } } void drawRings () { float radius = random (20, width/1.4); float x = random (0, width); float y = random (0, […]

Generative art experiment 3: Lord of the rings

void setup () { smooth(); size(500,900); render (); } void render () { fill (0, 0); background(255, 100, 0); for (int i = 0; i < random(50, 200); i++) { drawRings (); } } void drawRings () { float radius = random (20, width/1.4); float x = random (0, width); float y = random (0, […]

Generative art experiment 2: Pinkchalk spiral

January 12, 2012

float oldx = -999; float oldy = -999; float x; float y; int colour = 0; void setup () { smooth(); size (600, 600); drawit (); } void drawit () { background(155); oldx = -999; oldy = -999; colour = 0; int spirals = floor(random(500)); println(“drawing” + spirals); for (int i = 0; i < […]